Hesitation
in speaker's production and listener's reproduction of utterances

James G.
Martin

Abstract

Twenty-four college Ss (encoders)
described TAT pictures in short utterances. Each was yoked unsystematically with one
of 24 listener Ss (decoders) who heard his recorded utterances and attempted to reproduce
them. Words were classified as content or function. While encoders and
decoders yielded about the same proportion of content words (41%), encoders yielded a
relatively higher proportion of repeats, unfilled pauses, and total hesitations before
content words (which have greater uncertainty) than did decoders. Decoders placed
relatively more of their hesitations at sentence breaks than did encoders.
Apparently, while encoder pauses reflect uncertainty, decoder pauses tend more to mark
grammatical boundaries. The selection of semantic-syntactic structure precedes
selection of individual words during encoding but follows during decoding.

Martin,
J. 1967 Hesitation in speaker's production and listener's reproduction of
utterances. In Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 6: 903-909.